Mike English's blog

Sorry, everyone. I had really hoped to keep this updated more often, but this semester has turned out to be a rather busy one. I’d like to write something about trust, privacy, and activity streams, but I just haven’t had time to read up on the latest developments. Would anyone care to explain foaf+ssl to me?

Also, when I have time I’m going to be changing some things with the blog to clean it up and make it run a little better. Consider this a heads-up that change is ahead.

I’ll leave you with a nod to Chris Saad’s post about Peered Data Portability.

I really like this graph:

As Joseph, David, and Chris were all traveling this week, TheSocialWeb.tv posted video from Le Web as this week’s episode.

Dave Morin does an excellent job highlighting the value of Facebook‘s social graph data. – Real names, real friends, etc. as I pointed out the other day.

But I also think Michael Arrington raises an interesting point when he says that Facebook is not actually interested in being open. He goes on to say that “open” doesn’t always win, but is actually what the weaker competitors do when they band together to compete. I agree that it may not be in Facebook’s best interest to adopt the standards of the open stack at this point, but is openness really a sign of weakness? Or could it be rather a sign of strength when a social network adopts an open attitude – a sign of confidence in their network, and the commitment of their users to the community that their network provides? Is Facebook worried that being more “open” will degrade the value of the social graph data they’ve hoarded? Are things like Friend Connect, MySpaceID, and OpenSocial enough to force Facebook to adopt standards like OpenID and OAuth?

Much as I generally dislike the MySpace community, I’m really excited by Max Engel‘s enthusiasm about the open stack. If MySpace continues with its commitment to “open” ideas, a lot of users stand to benefit.

The biggest problem for “open” as I see it, is not having a place to control your identity that is both independent and centralized. A lot of sites are implementing bits and pieces of the open stack, but as far as I’ve seen, only a few of the large existing networks are trying to implement the whole thing. If I’m going to connect the dots between my accounts across the web and tie them all to one source for my profile information, I don’t want that source to be under someone else’s control. I don’t want my Facebook profile to be the definitive ‘me’ on the web, and I definitely don’t want it to be my MySpace page. I’m glad that we’re starting to have more freedom to choose, with a growing list of OpenID providers and all, but I still don’t see a comprehensive solution that works for me. I want complete independent and centralized control of my identity.

What makes Facebook so important? It seems that conversations about social networks always circle back to Facebook somehow. Why?

Well, I see a few reasons for this. First, Facebook has what is probably the most valuable social graph data. Accurate names and profiles are maintained by most of the users. I speculate that by slowly rolling out the service among colleges, and focusing on being a social utility, Facebook encouraged this social behavior. They didn’t add too many features or too many users too fast. As new users joined the network they copied the behavior of the earlier adopters, which was to provide accurate data.

But accuracy isn’t everything. You can find accurate profiles on LinkedIn for example, but LinkedIn doesn’t have the reach Facebook does. Facebook has penetrated the social networking market especially among college students (the original target audience) to such an extent that it is treated as a given, a ubiquitous utility, the way Google is treated for search. Facebook has entered the college student’s vernacular lexicon as a verb.

This is why Facebook is important. Not just because it’s done such a great job perfecting the social UX, – a vast improvement over MySpace‘s earlier efforts – but because ‘everyone you know’ is on Facebook, maintaining fairly accurate profiles.

It’s the data. Real data about real-world contacts.